From internment to infantry: 93-year-old WWII veteran shares his story

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KINGSBURG, Calif. (Tribune News Service) — Robert Yano had just turned 18 and registered for the draft when he was forced from his family’s farm in Kingsburg and shipped to an internment camp in Arizona.

“It’s just a desert,” Yano recalls of the camp, one of many that imprisoned thousands of Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants during World War II. “Nothing but sagebrush and rocks … and they had machine-gun towers with the machine guns pointing toward you. Not out, but toward you.”

The U.S. government changed Yano’s classification from citizen to illegal alien — for no other reason than his ethnicity. He remained in the camp until, at age 19, he was allowed to fight for his country.

He spent two years as an Army infantryman in France, Germany, and Italy while the nation he was fighting for kept his father and siblings in an internment camp. His mother, who was visiting family in Japan shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor, was never allowed to return to Kingsburg. She died of illness before the end of the war without being able to communicate with her family back in Fresno County.

Yano’s story is one of many from local people presented in a traveling exhibit, “Courage and Compassion: Our Shared Story of the Japanese American WWII Experience,” at Kingsburg Historical Park through Sunday, Feb. 4 — which is Yano’s 94th birthday.

There is no charge to see the exhibit, which is a project of the Go For Broke National Education Center, a nonprofit that educates the public about Japanese American WWII veterans and their contributions to democracy.

The displays are funded in part from a grant administered by the National Park Service.

Yano has been at the exhibit every day since it opened early last month. Recently, he spoke to a class of eighth graders from Rafer Johnson Junior High School who came to visit.

One boy asked if Yano ever tried to escape from Gila River War Relocation Center camp.

Yano chuckled, then responded seriously, “No, no.

“But do you know why? I would say we have a little bit more pride than to escape. Because if you escape, that’s not the right thing to do. You’re breaking the law, actually.”

But, he added, that doesn’t mean he never left the camp. Yano and a friend once sneaked out and hitchhiked to Phoenix to watch a cowboy movie and eat hot dogs. Then they hitchhiked back and sneaked back in.

Being an internee was a heavy blow to his spirit.

“I’m a citizen one time, born and raised here, put behind barbed wires, and then I’m not a citizen,” Yano says. “I’m nobody.”

Yano says he joined the Army “maybe to show that I am a good American.”

In 2011, Yano received a Congressional Gold Medal for his service with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team during WWII.

Kingsburg is among the smallest cities on the Courage and Compassion exhibit’s 10-city national tour. Dave Meyer, the local curator, says Japanese Americans made up about 20 percent of Kingsburg’s population of 1,500 in 1940. At that time, the town had many services that catered to Japanese Americans, including three grocery stores, a noodle house, a boarding house, labor service, and a Buddhist church with a language school.

The church and one of the Japanese American grocery stores was burned down during WWII.

Meyer hopes the museum exhibit helps people see “that fear drove us to take actions against people that were unjustified and illegal in every sense because they had constitutional rights.

“Two-thirds of the people who were interned were American citizens and theoretically could not be told that they had to move there,” Meyer says. “And now, with the fear we have about refugees, migrants, all of this stuff — I’m not suggesting that anyone is going to lock them up, but I think you need to be aware of how quickly civil rights can go down when people are afraid.”

The executive order that created what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt referred to as concentration camps was signed 76 years ago on Feb. 19, 1942.

Yano says what happened to him was “really disappointing” but “I have no bad feelings.” He shares his story with the hope people will learn from history, so what happened to his family never happens again.

A girl who visited the Courage and Compassion exhibit asked Yano, “Out of all the hard times you’ve been through, what was your happiest moment?”

“I think my happiest moment was when they said we were going home,” Yano replied, referring to the war in Europe. “I missed home. There’s no place like home. There’s nothing like home.”

Robert Yano, 93, a World War II veteran, holds up a photo he took that shows the bodies of dead Italian leaders during the war. He was speaking to middle school children on Monday, Jan. 29, 2018 at Kingsburg Historical Park in California, where an exhibit on the Japanese internment experience is being held. Yano, a Japanese American, was taken to an internment camp in Arizona before enlisting in the U.S. Army.CRAIG KOHLRUSS/FRESNO BEE/TNS